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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I think the campaign is pointless. If you want to 'free Java', fork it. Then Oracle can choose to get on board or not.

They paid a lot of money to get Java under their wing and they aren't going to just give it away afterwards. Yes, they were for this in the past, but the obviously realized it wasn't going to happen (possibly because it won't work) and chose to buy it instead to further their goals.

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Problem is, they still have the right patents and the right attitude to kill forks, and as other pointed out it is debatable if the patents grant applies to derivates of OpenJDK.

What the world needs to do is to start from scratch, with a new VM, new specs, a new base class library, plus a compiler that converts Java bytecode to this new VM ... something like .NET / Android, but more cross-platform and less tied to Java's standard library.

I strongly agree. There's a real opportunity here to create a truly open VM, one that is designed from the beginning to support functional languages. It would need a major corporate sponsor though, because building a new platform requires a very substantial investment. Microsoft... you listening?

Why not Parrot?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine

IMHO it tries to do too much, and doesn't have enough resources.

A platform that resembles Java / .NET would also make porting of existing libraries easier.

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